We’ve had a few goes with various technology partners at pumping out a mobile version of The Register over the years. But for reasons too dull to dwell on, each attempt foundered on the shores of irrelevance and indifference.
Undaunted, we are back, this time with our own try-out at Register Mobile. [We won’t call it the Mobile …

COMMENTS

Product suggestion...

"And yes, we are prepping an iPhone app version of The Reg. But apart from the obvious eye candy, we're hard pressed to think of anything unique that we can bring to the party - that is, anything that we would not also add to our "vanilla" mobile version. All suggestions welcome."

Commentard filtering for those who don't want to see their beloved iPaidtoomuch mocked on its own screen...?

Perfect Timing!

Bloody marvellous! I got a text message from my network provider yesterday informing me of free 'net access on my mobile for the month of November. It had never even occurred to me to use the service before. Anyhoo, first thing I did with this new found financial freedom was to try and read 'TheReg" and it was an awful experience. This couldn't have happened at a better time!

iPhone version

Mobile Comments

I noticed the mobile site had been updated last week, and it's definetly an improvement, but why do we have to go back to the full site to see comments? It would be very easy to implement a mobile page for viewing comments at least.

Please don't redirect mobiles, just add a link at the top!

I hate using mobile sites on my phone, I'd much rather use the full fat version. The BBC is awful at this - once it detects you're using a phone it's almost impossible to get back and STAY back on the real site.

Plus, I use the register for benchmarking the browser I work on so please don't force it over to the mobile site.

Minor probs

I noticed that the Hardware reviews missed out the rating panel, recently moved to the front of the review, which also tells you the price (meaning that I read a review of an £1800 telly that I'd normally have skipped!).

It's also the case that changing the orientation of my iPhone 3GS led to minor alignment problems.

Re: Fantastic!

We haven't gone beyond the "wouldn't it be nice to have mobile version for reading comments". This is something we will address in the New Year.

However, an acceptable UI for posting comments on the mobile version sounds a lot harder - we are inclined to keep things as they are. But by all means, point us to mobile rev /comments posting UIs that work for you.

Pretty good....

Couple of small changes I might make though. One is to have the date and time of each story and to have them in strictly date order so you know which is the most recent. Another, if there's room, is to include the category so you know if you're about to read the latest about El Reg's mascot or a very dry story about a hardware company's financial results.

Re: Minor probs

no ads

browser sniffing...

...is a bad idea ;)

your new mobile site is excellent however and I like it, will probably use it from now on on my HTC magic, although i've had no problems with the full fat version on my phone i prefer the mobile site as it stops me zooming all over the place...

once again...don't do the browser sniffing...it annoys the crap out of me...(how difficult is it to put an m. in the address bar anyways)

Wwaaaaaaaaaaa

Please

@Drew

There's nothing in the "add your own comment" section that's really at all difficult to implement on even crappy phone browsers; just make a nice simple form, with nice simple radio buttons, and a nice simple https submission landing page, and it should be all fine. Phone users don't expect much... (Oh, and the link to comments, being much smaller than the chunk of related stories below the article main, could probably happily go right between the article and the related links. Your devoted fans already read most of the related articles and are more likely to be interested in the comments, so why make 'em scroll further than they have to?)

Looks nice on Blackberry 83xx browsers as well as the Bold. Well done.

Thumbs up

iPhone App Features

1. Have the first page loaded be selectable- let the user choose if they want the main page, or one of the sub-sections, to be the first thing they see.

2. Have a link to the BOfH archives, or even a dedicated section. Also, being able to cycle to the next (and previous) article without going back to the main page for each archive would be quite nice, especially on a limited-bandwidth connection.

downright spiffy

Don't you sniff my browser, you perv.

Top banana.

But don't bother checking for mobiles on the server - give us the choice. Getting information out of the Beeb has become jolly difficult since they ram their coloured WAPness down the throat of my throbbing 800x480 mobile.

@ El Reg.

yup, works for me...

I generally...

...have no problems reading el Reg on my bb 9000 as-is. It's quite convenient, really - I'd prefer the full version over the mobile version. Comments work fine too; the only glitch is that the icon selection can be a bit flaky sometimes - but even that's usually not bad, and seems to have been gradually improving(?).

Two suggestions for mobile site...

Thanks for making moves to improve the Reg mobile experience. Two suggestions to improve the mobile site though:

Firstly, please add separate RSS feeds for all the mobile versions of the sites. I use an Android RSS app on my G1 called Newsrob (which syncs to Google Reader) that can display the pages within the app. I'd love to be able to get to the mobile content via this method.

Secondly, on the mobile pages please also add a link on each story to a mobile version of the comments. After getting the mobile page loading quickly, it's rather tedious then having to navigate through the main version of the site to get to the comments. Totally defeats the object of going to the mobile version in the first place!

No ads?

Another vote for mobile comments

As the 'free wisdom' offered in comments often contains as much insight as the original article, they're an integral part of the 'El Reg' experience, and as such really need to be supported in the 'slim' version.

It doesn't need to be anything sophisticated, just a simple https form to add a comment, and the comments themselves linked from the bottom of the article as in the 'full-fat' version... they need no additional formatting whatever.

I really welcome the idea of the low bandwidth version - not all of us are physically able to use the latest and greatest (?) touchscreen marvels when we're out and about, so it's an important step forwards in accessibility terms too.